Bataan (1943)
Bataan (1943), directed by Tay Garnett.
Watching Midway (2019) recently I was reminded of a little genre of WW2 films about the time soon after Pearl Harbor in those months when the US was losing the Pacific war. Those made soon after the actual events would include:
Cry 'Havoc' (1943)
Destination Tokyo (1943)
Gung Ho! (1943)
So Proudly We Hail! (1943)
The Sullivans (1944)
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)
Wake Island (1942)
Bataan is another: assorted leftover troops are required to blow up a bridge and keep the Japanese from rebuilding it. This is to buy time for the main forces to retreat down the peninsula while waiting for rescue (which never came).
We get straight to the action with little prep time. The violence is more explicit than usual for this time. They walk out and shoot dead soldiers just to be sure, which reminds me of R. Lee Ermey in The Siege of Firebase Gloria (1989): "Go out and kill the wounded; I don't want any surprises tonight".
Notable cast:
Robert Taylor is the career Army Sgt in charge. Tough, relaxed, quietly competent. The Captain and Lt are smart enough to let him run things.
Thomas Mitchell is his pal, an old soldier from the Chemical Corps. Since chemical weapons weren't used in WW2 he would have been in charge of the flame throwers, but they don't have any.
Lloyd Nolan is the unit's "attitude problem" character.
Robert Walker -- age 25 -- is a displaced sailor and comic relief, like a happy puppy.
Desi Arnaz -- age 26 -- is Pvt. Felix Ramirez of the California National Guard. I think he must have been a zoot-suiter in civilian life.
I don't remember seeing singer Kenneth Spencer before. He is the unit's black soldier during a time when the Army still practiced segregation, so this is an unusual role. He plays an engineer with useful demolition skills.
It is like The Lost Patrol (1934) where they are picked off one by one. I'll bet you can predict the final two. And then the last man standing. He's staying for the end and digs his own grave before going to Valhalla like the men in The Wild Bunch (1969).
Notes:
The bridge is a matte painting of what looks like a Roman aqueduct.
The firepower of their weapons is ludicrous: blowing the bridge with hand grenades, shooting down an airplane with a tommy gun ("Range and accuracy of a pitched baseball" -- RA Heinlein). They needed mortars but didn't have those either.
Says the sour cook: "There's no sugar for the coffee. And no coffee. There's maggots in the meat and the meat is mule".
The Japanese are called "monkeys" and "no-tailed baboons". They torture prisoners and leave them on display.
It is filmed entirely on sound stages and backlots. This hurts the sense of realism, but a lot of films are teleplays and we accept it after a while.
The wikipedia article has a deliriously bad academic citation:
quote
According to one historian, the film "successfully made white viewers aware ... of the inherent sadism in the American lynching ritual". By the 1940s, publications were able to mass-distribute photographs taken of hanged men, so there was a "rewriting of the respective relations of the black and the Asian to the white norm, as the film adjusted to a wartime context [which raised questions of integration]".
I don't know what film he was thinking of; it's delusional to read that into this one.
Available on DVD.
